The Coast of Chicago

E-239: Knopf. Very Good. 1990. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Alfred A Knopf, New York. 1990. 173 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Dybek ( Childhood and Other Neighborhoods ) here evokes the bizarre mysteries of everyday life in Chicago's gritty ethnic enclaves, the territory of the 14 stories in his second collection. The author's memorable characters lead odd, fairy-tale existences. Marcy in "Chopin in Winter" returns home from college pregnant and disgraced, and plays her way through Chopin's piano oeuvre before moving without warning (her note reads simply "Ma, don't worry") to a black neighborhood on the city's South Side. In "Nighthawks," a suite of meditations on love and loss, Choco, a conga drummer, is led through the subways on a hauntingly surreal trip inspired by a vision of his dead girlfriend. Dybek's fiction is not without a comic edge: Ziggy Zilinski in "Blight" suffers from a recurring nightmare in which atomic bombs drop on Chicago when the White Sox win the pennant. A quote from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado provides the phantasmagoric book with an apt epigraph: "Out of the whole of memory, there's one thing worthwhile: the great gift of calling back dreams." EB; 7.6 X 5.0 X 0.9 inches; 173 pages .